Keynote Speakers
John Willinsky
The Quality of Open Scholarship: What Follows from Open?
Synopsis
Amid the strategic and principled pursuit of open access to research,
developments 
are underway in scholarly publishing that are using
the current and coming openness to enhance the quality and value
of the work that researchers and scholars do. This presentation
will consider such developments as promising extensions of the
most traditional of critical apparatuses, namely, the text, table,
figure, index, footnote, and commentary.
BIO NOTE
John Willinsky is Professor of Education at Stanford University and
director of the Public Knowledge Project at Stanford University,
the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University.
Much of his work, including his book, The Access Principle: The
Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006),
winner of two outstanding book awards, as well as PKP's award-winning
open source software for journals and conferences, is free to download
through the project's website (http://pkp.sfu.ca).
Stevan Harnad
Filling OA Space At Long Last: Integrating University and Funder Mandates
and Metrics
Synopsis: Since
my last ElPub Keynote 8 years ago in Russia, there are signs of acceleration
toward Open Access (OA) at long last: First, since the creation of
free software for building OAI-compliant Institutional Repositories
(IRs) in 2000, most of the major universities worldwide now have
IRs, but they are still mostly empty. In 2004 the UK Parliamentary
Select Committee recommended mandating that all researchers self-archive
their peer-reviewed research articles in IRs to make them OA ("Green
OA"). The majority of journals have already endorsed author OA self-archiving.
In 2006 six of the seven UK Research Councils adopted the mandate.
Soon so did a number of other funders and universities the world
over, including, most recently, the NIH (Dec 2007) and Harvard (Feb
2008) in the US. In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE),
which ranks UK universities based on their research performance and funds
them proportionately, announced that as of 2008 the ranking would be based
on metrics instead of panel evaluation. OA has been shown to enhance
research metrics. The incentive feedback loop for OA has been closed. Once
100% (Green) OA has been reached, there will sooner or later be a
transition to OA publishing ("Gold
OA"), with journals downsizing to become online peer-review service
providers and certifiers only, while archiving and access-provision
are offloaded onto the worldwide network of OA IRs and their central
harvesters and peer-review costs per paper paid for by the author-institution
out of their annual subscription savings.
Bio Note: STEVAN HARNAD http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad was born in Hungary, did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University. He is currently Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University, UK and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Universite du Quebec a Montreal. His research is on categorisation, communication and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences http://www.bbsonline.org/ (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), he is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and author and contributor to over 250 publications, including Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (NY Acad Sci 1976), Lateralization in the Nervous System (Acad Pr 1977), Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control (CUP 1982), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (CUP 1987), The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments and Consequences (CUP 1988), Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing (1995) and Essays on the Foundations and Fringes of Cognition (in prep).